Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Bride By Plat Map

There’s no place like home. Perhaps with as much vested
interest as people take in seeking out their own face in a photograph of a
crowd, knowing “I was there,” we may also derive the same recognition when
perusing maps of childhood homes. At one point, we were, after all, “there.”

I can’t pretend to know what home was like for my
mother-in-law’s ancestors. I know very little about her father, John Ambrose Flowers of Perry County, Ohio. I know even less about his father, Joseph E. Flowers.

I do, however, still have a copy of an undated plat map for
the township in which they resided. In a visit to the Perry County
courthouse many years ago, I had asked what I thought would be the impossible
question: “Can I have a copy of that?”

“That” was the plat map. Oversized, bound in a large hard-cover
volume, it was the unwieldy type of untouchable relic from the past that was
suitable only for archiving—not for releasing
to the unwashed public.

Though the clerk might have considered the question unusual,
she thankfully found a way to accommodate my request. Asking if I “minded”
having the copy broken up into two eleven-by-seventeen pages, she set to work
producing a facsimile.

I was elated—until I considered how I would preserve that
photocopied document. Just the trip home from Ohio presented challenges. This is just not
the size for which one simply runs to the stationery store for a manila folder.
And once home, where to store it? (Thankfully, my sister-in-law sent me a
beautifully ornamented wooden box in which it fits perfectly, along with other
treasured papers.)

Keeping such a record stowed away, however, defeats the
purpose of using the document. This
next consideration received its answer last January when my Genealogy Angel
loaned me her Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner. See, now I have a digitized version of
the plat map, and you can see it, too.

That’s a good thing, because I want you to visualize what I
am talking about when I mentioned yesterday that so many of the families in Perry County
are intertwined.

Though you don’t (yet) know all the surnames involved in
this Flowers family, when I let my eyes wander across the page, I start
noticing something: Hey! These surnames are all somewhere in my genealogy
database! Somewhere across the years, these neighbors started becoming in-laws,
and wedding bells blended quite a few of the old, recognizable family lines
from that plat map.

On this map, I saw Gordons, Hammonds, Deans, other Flowers
families, and many, many Sniders. The singular calligraphy drew me in, and
tempted my eyes to wander over the geographic details: a proposed railroad
winding its way across properties, perhaps on its way to the Saltillo Coal
company where John Ambrose Flowers later worked; several spots labeled “coal bank.”
Roads and creeks meandering freely over the land disregarded the strict
adherence to the grids that comprised each sector.

On the section labeled “22,” I saw the name, “Jos. Flowers.”
Nestled in between the N. Hammond property and
several sets of Sniders—including the inevitable alternate “Snyder” spelling—this
spot was the one our family’s ancestors called home. I could see the lower
portion of the Flowers property bore the legend, “Coal Bank,” and remembered my
mother-in-law’s mentions of an oil rig on the property.

Relative to the other parcels, I could see it was a sliver
of land. The number below the name, if meaning the number of acres, showed this
to be a 45 acre parcel. For suburban homeowners today, that would seem an unmanageable
amount of land; for farmers of those days, in which land grants had once been
obtained in 160 acre parcels, it might not be sufficient for a decent-sized
business operation. Indeed, the size—and the surrounding labels of “Snider”—made
me wonder if this was a concession to Joseph Flowers on account of his bride,
the former Anna Maria Snider.

Of course, that was conjecture on my part. I didn’t even
have a date for this plat map I had gotten so many years ago. I guessed it was
from the 1800s, but I had no idea when.

Thanks to the wonders of digitization and the Internet, what
never had previously been accessible in ways other than the sheer act of
personal travel can now be obtained with a click of a mouse. I decided that my
chances of finding my plat map on a website somewhere might indeed be quite
possible nowadays.

And that, indeed, is how it is. Consider this Clayton
township plat map I discovered here, dated 1859. Gaining my bearings by first
locating that section 22 that Joseph Flowers eventually called home, I see that
the whole area belonged to Jacob Snider. While there were many Snider men in Perry
County back then, it is
most likely that this Jacob Snider was Anna Maria’s father. At that time,
Joseph Flowers would have been only sixteen—eight years prior to having gotten
up the gumption to ask Anna’s father for her hand in marriage.

The same website that featured the 1859 plat map also
provided a scanned copy of one for 1875. Looking at that map, it turns out it
is a copy of the same original from which I gleaned mine, thus providing me a
date for my document. Some things are indeed better late than never—especially in
the case of those early research years when details such as these slipped the
mind in the face of exciting discoveries.

Spanning the time from the 1859 map until the map of 1875,
it may indeed have been so: that plat maps show the family names intertwining,
buying and selling property to arrange for married children to still remain
close to home. While no one would actually have shopped for a bride using a plat map, the end result seems much the
same. Familiarity, it seems, does not
breed contempt. It breeds grandchildren.

2 comments:

Fantastic article. You are such a good writer and you made genealogy sound so interesting. I'm trying to make more time to read more blogs and yours would be one I would want to follow more often. I'm working on one as well (actually two). (thestephensherwoodletters.blogspot.com)

Thank you for your kind comments, Grant. I'm so glad that you are intending to join us here as the story unfolds.

Actually, I've been to your blog, and you have quite a bit of treasure there. Sometimes, transcribing the material and letting the letters tell their own story can be priceless. Your commentary will continue to develop, the more you are working at it. I think your concept is great--and I have to confess I envy you all the family treasures you've come across.

About Me

It is my contention that, after a lifetime, one of the greatest needs people have is to be remembered. They want to know: have I made a difference?
I write because I can't keep for myself the gifts others have entrusted to me. Through what I've already been given--though not forgetting those to whom I must pass this along--from family I receive my heritage; through family I leave a legacy. With family I weave a tapestry. These are my strands.